“
Blair liked to think of herself as a hopeless romantic in the style of old movie actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. She was always coming up with plot devices for the movie she was starring in at the moment, the movie that was her life.
”
”
Cecily von Ziegesar (Gossip Girl (Gossip Girl, #1))
“
Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There
”
”
Herman Wouk (The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1))
“
Is she a very clever little actress, acting a part? Or is she a genuine semi-moronic suicidal victim?
”
”
Agatha Christie (Third Girl (Hercule Poirot, #40))
“
...she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked — a dancer, an actress.
”
”
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
“
I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours—an actress—was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.
”
”
Joan Didion
“
I end up watching this movie about some girl who's supposed to be so smart and edgy and unpopular. She wears glasses, that's how you know she's so smart. And she's the only one that has dark hair in the school- a place that looks like Planet Blond.
Anyway, she somehow ends up going to the prom- hello, gag- and she doesn't wear her glasses, so suddenly she's all beautiful. And she's bashful and shy because she doesn't feel comfortable wearing a dress. But then the guy says something like, "Wow, I never knew you were so pretty," and she feels on top of the world.
So, basically, the whole point is she's pretty. Oh, and smart, too. But what's really important here is that she's pretty.
For a second I think about Katie. About her thin little Clarissa Le Fey.
It must be a pain being fat. There are NO fat people on Planet Blond.
I don't get it. I mean, even movies where the actress is smart- like they seem like they'd be smart in real life, they're all gorgeous. And they usually get a boyfriend somewhere in the story. Even if they say they don't want one. They always, always end up falling in love, and you're supposed to be like, "Oh, good."
I once said this to my mom, and she laughed. "Honey, Hollywood... reality- two different universes. Don't make yourself crazy."
Which made me feel pretty pathetic. Like I didn't know the difference between a movie and the real world.
But then when everyone gets on you about your hair and your clothes and your this and your that, and "Are you fat?" and "Are you sexy?" you start thinking, Hey, maybe I'm not the only one who can't tell the difference between movies and reality.
Maybe everyone really does think you can look like that. And that you should look like that.
Because, you know, otherwise you might not get to go to the prom and fall in love.
”
”
Mariah Fredericks (Head Games)
“
No, this was the career I wanted; a writer could be employed for as long as she could hold a pencil; for as long as her mind still held out. But an actress—even an actress like Mary—had a fleeting shelf life.
”
”
Melanie Benjamin (The Girls in the Picture)
“
Dash it all, she’s an actress! Don’t take her so seriously. Actors don’t have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There’s a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she’ll be Born Again!
”
”
John Le Carré (The Little Drummer Girl)
“
Damaged little girls are exactly what the porn industry preys upon and depends upon. It is estimated that 90% of porn performers are sexual abuse survivors and the average age of a porn actress is 22.8 years old.
”
”
Shelley Lubben (Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn)
“
Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.
”
”
J. Randy Taraborrelli (The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe)
“
The two guys with the Weimaraners did note that Amanda looked a little like the girl in the Twilight movies, if not in the hair and the cheekbones, then in the nose and the forhead and the close-set-eyes, but then they got into an argument over whether said actress was a Kristen or a Kirsten, and I wandered over to the middle-aged woman before it devolved into a Team Edward vs Team Jacob imbroglio
”
”
Dennis Lehane
“
Ivy just had to look at him to know that Dean Bennet would never look at her. He was the kind of guy who dated flamenco dancers or famous actresses or multi-lingual international human rights lawyers. Not sheltered little daddy’s girls who could barely look at him without turning red.
”
”
Amy Andrews (The Colonel's Daughter (Men of the Zodiac, #8))
“
Lovely continues seriously, as if she has not heard. “I am an actress, so I need to be reading scripts and having fluent English, you understand? So that is how I am knowing Jivan, sweet girl. She was spending her time on teaching the poors. How many of you are doing that in your own life?” she demands. “Who are you all to judge her?
”
”
Megha Majumdar (A Burning)
“
Yes. Absolutely, I wanted that part. No other little girl was going to spend that time with my daddy while I stayed home! I was going to be an actress.
”
”
Jackey Neyman Jones (Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate)
“
I remember how during a casting session in Beverly Hills, a director described an A-list actress as being "pretty for a black girl"; he thought it was a compliment.
”
”
Jeetendr Sehdev (The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells (and How to Do It Right))
“
The only time I'll be caught dancing is in the end zone after scoring a touchdown.
”
”
Nicole Heart (The Spunky Girl & Her Popular Player)
“
Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
”
”
Laurie Penny
“
There are two powers in this world which cannot be matched. Beauty and Youth. Buy the beauty and imprison the youth. Give the best models, actress, and girls from town and nail them. I do not care how much it costs.
”
”
Ravindra Shukla (A Maverick Heart: Between Love and Life)
“
My argument for the past couple of months was simple and valid—I can’t be with a girl whose last name’s Cockburn. It’s embarrassing. For me, for her, for everyone involved. Tanaka said that Cockburn is a perfectly legitimate last name, and even pulled out some bullshit facts from the Internet, including a Wikipedia page for actress Olivia Wilde. Apparently, her original last name is Cockburn (can’t argue with that. She’s legit fuckable).
”
”
L.J. Shen (Blood to Dust)
“
It’s the moment when the girl in the teen rom-com abandons her glasses and ponytail and descends the stairs in all her prom-ready glory. It’s the moment when her high school crush finally sees her for the beautiful twenty-six-year-old actress that she is.
”
”
Alexis Daria (Only Santas in the Building (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #5))
“
Then she remembered Safi, the prostitutes in Amsterdam, the acrobat twins, the actress in Monaco, the duchess in London. Most of all she remembered standing in the parlor of that ship and watching a Russian girl swallow his erection whole. She wished the girl had bit it off.
”
”
Zoraida Córdova (The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina)
“
What did theories matter any more? She wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be. (...) For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over. (...) "You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You've made the perceptions. Why don't you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service - like theft - like murder - like blowing something up - say, a police station - for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where's the action? You're the free soul around here. Don't give us the words, give us the deeds." (...) Anger suspended her bewilderment and dulled the pain of her disgrace (...) She wished terribly that she could go mad so that everyone would be sorry for her; she wished she was just a raving lunatic waiting to be let off, not a stupid little fool of a radical actress (...) (part I, chapter 7)
”
”
John Le Carré (The Little Drummer Girl)
“
The actress winked. 'It's a small industry, yeah? People get together... They break up... Maybe someone banged one of the new girls, or they broke up and she quit. Who doesn't have one or two people on their hit list?' 'Do you?' Fukuzawa asked her, but she just giggled and evaded the question.
”
”
Kafka Asagiri (文豪ストレイドッグス 探偵社設立秘話 [Bungō Stray Dogs Tanteisha Setsuritsu Hiwa])
“
Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
Now, now, child. Ugly's not such a bad thing to be called. Not at all!" She said. "We've all been called it at one time or another, and it hasn't killed any of us," she added, wiping juice off her chin with her palm. "In fact, we've been called far worse," said the actress, The others chimed in. Difficult. Obstinate. Stubborn. Shrewish. Willful. Contrary. Unnatural. Abominable. Intractable. Immoral. Ambitious. Shocking, Wayward. "Ugly's nothing," said the diva. "Pretty... now that's a dangerous word." "Pretty hooks you fast and kills you slowly" said the acrobat. "Call a girl pretty once, and all she wants, forevermore, is to hear it again," the magician added.
”
”
Jennifer Donnelly (Stepsister)
“
Lela’s love affair with nuptials was born at the age of eleven, when she watched two epic weddings on TV. In July of 1981, Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles of Wales were wed in London. Back home in Wisconsin, Lela watched every minute of it with her mom, perched on the edge of their brown pleather sectional. Then, in November, fictional couple Luke and Laura tied the knot on every teenage girl’s favorite soap opera, General Hospital. Actress Genie Francis wore a bizarre head-hugging veil and a dress that looked like a marshmallow. Her groom, Anthony Geary, rocked his deceptively fluffy ‘80s hair. Lela couldn’t help but be transfixed. It all felt larger than life. And her little eleven year-old heart gave into it lock, stock and barrel.
”
”
Karen Booth (Gray Hair Don't Care (Never Too Late, #1))
“
It's an old story," Julia says, leaning back in her chair. "Only for me, it's new. I went to school for industrial design. All my life I've been fascinated by chairs - I know it sounds silly, but it's true. Form meets purpose in a chair. My parents thought I was crazy, but somehow I convinced them to pay my way to California. To study furniture design. I was all excited at first. It was totally unlike me to go so far away from home. But I was sick of the cold and sick of the snow. I figured a little sun might change my life. So I headed down to L.A. and roomed with a friend of an ex-girlfriend of my brother's. She was an aspiring radio actress, which meant she was home a lot. At first, I loved it. I didn't even let the summer go by. I dove right into my classes. Soon enough, I learned I couldn't just focus on chairs. I had to design spoons and toilet-bowl cleaners and thermostats. The math never bothered me, but the professors did. They could demolish you in a second without giving you a clue if how to rebuild. I spent more and more time in the studio, with other crazed students who guarded their projects like toy-jealous kids. I started to go for walks. Long walks. I couldn't go home because my roommate was always there. The sun was too much for me, so I'd stay indoors. I spent hours in supermarkets, walking aisle to aisle, picking up groceries and then putting them back. I went to bowling alleys and pharmacies. I rode buses that kept their lights on all night. I sat in Laundromats because once upon a time Laundromats made me happy. But now the hum of the machines sounded like life going past. Finally, one night I sat too long in the laundry. The woman who folded in the back - Alma - walked over to me and said, 'What are you doing here, girl?' And I knew that there wasn't any answer. There couldn't be any answer. And that's when I knew it was time to go.
”
”
David Levithan (Are We There Yet?)
“
Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty. Peculiar, clever Victoria Hwang is going to be in Artforum next month, and probably in the collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim; Renee Zellweger - moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one - was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception - the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness - but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renée Zellweger becomes a beauty, and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her. Victoria Hwang's videos and sculptures are about, it seems, to become not just intriguing and amusing but significant.
”
”
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
“
The door opened and Muriel came into the room. She looked round her a moment, smiling; and, instead of the powdered little actress she had expected, Mummie saw a tall slim girl, with light brown hair and no paint on her face, dressed simply in good clothes, a girl with wide-apart eyes who looked right amongst the furniture from New Grove House and Kicky’s drawings on the wall, and the books and the rugs. As Mummie went to greet her, Muriel ran forward and took her hands and kissed her, and said, ‘I am so glad to be here with you all’; then looked a little troubled, and lowered her voice, glancing towards the door, and said, ‘I’m in such a way about Gerald, he is starting one of his horrid colds.’ Mummie looked at the girls and smiled, Trixie nodded her head, and Sylvia and May leant back with a sigh of relief. The ewee lamb was safe in the fold at last.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Gerald: A Portrait)
“
Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race
card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese
imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of
non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be
white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning
actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End
production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K.
Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play
the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue
in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg.
Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’
of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl
to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role
ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and
abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time:
All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in
love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was
an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew
they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s
been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the
movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much
more than, 'Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on
feelings of disgust.
These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the
book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears,
wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all
along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.
”
”
Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
“
Actress Winona Ryder, who starred in Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Little Women thought she had it all. She was famous, making lots of money, and was romantically involved with actor Johnny Depp. But it wasn’t enough. She shared in an interview in October 2000, “When I was 18, I was driving around at two in the morning, completely crying and alone and scared. I drove by this magazine stand that has this Rolling Stone that I was on the cover of, and it said, ‘Winona Ryder: The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And there I was feeling more alone than I ever had.
”
”
Dan Schaeffer (A Better Country: Preparing for Heaven)
“
No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder at a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life’s potential for bringing unsuspected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience, in unique conditions that would allow no room for possible error, the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces, because one knows it is forever beyond one’s reach,
”
”
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
“
The recollection that I was to be taken to hear Berma alone distracted me from my grief. But just as I did not wish to see any storms except on those coasts where they raged with most violence, so I should not have cared to hear the great actress except in one of those classic parts in which Swann had told me that she touched the sublime. For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have certain scruples about allowing our soul to gather, instead of these, other, inferior, impressions, which are liable to make us form a false estimate of the value of Beauty.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
“
The last week of shooting, we did a scene in which I drag Amanda Wyss, the sexy, blond actress who played Tina, across the ceiling of her bedroom, a sequence that ultimately became one of the most visceral from the entire Nightmare franchise. Tina’s bedroom was constructed as a revolving set, and before Tina and Freddy did their dance of death, Wes did a few POV shots of Nick Corri (aka Rod) staring at the ceiling in disbelief, then we flipped the room, and the floor became the ceiling and the ceiling became the floor and Amanda and I went to work.
As was almost always the case when Freddy was chasing after a nubile young girl possessed by her nightmare, Amanda was clad only in her baby-doll nightie. Wes had a creative camera angle planned that he wanted to try, a POV shot from between Amanda’s legs. Amanda, however, wasn’t in the cameramen’s union and wouldn’t legally be allowed to operate the cemera for the shot. Fortunately, Amy Haitkin, our director of photography’s wife, was our film’s focus puller and a gifted camera operator in her own right. Being a good sport, she peeled off her jeans and volunteered to stand in for Amanda. The makeup crew dapped some fake blood onto her thighs, she lay down on the ground, Jacques handed her the camera, I grabbed her ankles, and Wes called, “Action.”
After I dragged Amy across the floor/ceiling, I spontaneously blew her a kiss with my blood-covered claw; the fake blood on my blades was viscous, so that when I blew her my kiss of death, the blood webbed between my blades formed a bubble, a happy cinematic accident. The image of her pale, slender, blood-covered legs, Freddy looming over her, straddling the supine adolescent girl, knife fingers dripping, was surreal, erotic, and made for one of the most sexually charged shots of the movie. Unfortunately it got left on the cutting-room floor. If Wes had left it in, the MPAA - who always seemed to have it out for Mr. Craven - would definitely have tagged us with an X rating. You win some, you lose some.
”
”
Robert Englund (Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams)
“
Though
the actresses who played female boys were of all ages and performed in a vari-
ety of acting styles, they were generally small, thin, white, and photogenic, and
their performances combined boldness and vulnerability. Their femaleness al-
lowed them to convey fragility and androgynous beauty. These performances
demonstrate that cross-gender casting, which may seem like an inherently
transgressive practice to twenty-first-century scholars, can also uphold conser-
vative gender, class, and racial regimes. At the same time, the performances
cannot be dismissed as reactionary or antifeminist, because they embodied
middle-class women’s sentimental politics and created a space in which wom-
en’s bodies had an important role in producing an idealized masculinity.
”
”
Laura Horak (Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934)
“
In a press interview at the time, Gable said, “My days of playing the dashing lover are over. I’m no longer believable in those parts. There has been considerable talk about older guys wooing and winning leading ladies half their age. I don’t think the public likes it, and I don’t care for it myself. It’s not realistic. Actresses that I started out with like Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck have long since quit playing glamour girls and sweet young things. Now it’s time I acted my age.
“Let’s be honest,” he continued. “It’s a character role, and I’ll be playing more of them. There’s a risk involved, of course. I have no idea if I can attain the success as a character actor as I did playing the dashing young lover, but it’s a chance I have to take. Not everybody is able to do it.
”
”
Warren G. Harris (Clark Gable: A Biography)
“
The hat-check girl wore her hair in a schoolgirl pageboy so you were meant to think of Dorothy Collins – all innocence, wide-eyed and breathless – but this was mock-innocent and she knew her business, a narrow waist and shapely hips, lovely full breasts thrust out and upward inside the black satin bodice probably by one of those wired contraptions Howard Hughes had allegedly invented, the strapless brassiere a marvel of American know-how defying gravity, invented for that busty film actress Jane Russell who was probably one of his mistresses. A thing like that must hurt as much as the high-heeled pointy-toed shoes, Lyle Stevick though, worse than the corsets poor Hannah wore, sighing and lacing herself up as if the flesh was something you had to carry around with you, not exactly you but your burden and responsibility.
”
”
Joyce Carol Oates (You Must Remember This)
“
Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra’s rendition of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). “Jean Arthur is my favorite actress,” said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. “. . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress.” Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice.
”
”
Eve Golden (Bride of Golden Images)
“
Following the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades of middle
school, high school would have been a fresh start. When I got to
Fairfax High I would insist on being called Suzanne. I would
wear my hair feathered or up in a bun. I would have a body that
the boys wanted and the girls envied, but I’d be so nice on top of
it all that they would feel too guilty to do anything but worship
me. I liked to think of myself — having reached a sort of queenly
W
status — as protecting misfit kids in the cafeteria. When someone
taunted Clive Saunders for walking like a girl, I would deliver
swift vengeance with my foot to the taunter’s less-protected parts.
When the boys teased Phoebe Hart for her sizable breasts, I
would give a speech on why boob jokes weren’t funny. I had to
forget that I too had made lists in the margins of my notebook
when Phoebe walked by: Winnebagos, Hoo-has, Johnny Yellows.
At the end of my reveries, I sat in the back of the car as my father
drove. I was beyond reproach. I would overtake high school in a
matter of days, not years, or, inexplicably, earn an Oscar for Best
Actress during my junior year.
These were my dreams on Earth.
”
”
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
“
When he was sixteen (1923), Peter got a job as copy boy on a New York tabloid and entered a saltier, more hard-bitten world. It was a roaring, lush, lousy tabloid. Everybody was drunk all the time. The managing editor hired girl reporters on condition they sleep with him. New staffs moved in and were mowed down like the Light Brigade. Chorus girls, debutantes, and widows suspected of murdering their husbands were perched on desks with their thighs showing to be photographed. An endless parade of cranks, freaks, ministers, actresses, and politicians moved through the big babbling room, day and night. The city editor went crazy one afternoon. So did his successor. And among the typewriters and the paste pots and the thighs, Peter walked with simple delight.
A young reporter took a liking to him, found he was homeless, and insisted he share an elegant bachelor apartment uptown. There were constant parties, starting at dawn and ending as the hush of twilight settled over the city. People went to work and went to parties until they got the two pursuits confused and never noticed the difference. Whisky was oxygen, women were furniture, thinking was masochism.
”
”
Jack Iams
“
Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.
"Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed.
I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.
It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ...
I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone.
But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women in barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women who watched TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for is when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.
Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do.
"Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try."
She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, insider and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.
"I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home.
The baby came four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 PM.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
If any actress best represents the snappy 1930s dame, it’s Joan Blondell. During that era she played a lively assortment of chorus girls, waitresses, golddiggers, reporters and secretaries in a total of 53 movies, 44 of them for Warner Bros. “Yet, for all that overwork,” Mick LaSalle writes in Complicated Women, “Blondell hardly ever had a false moment. Self-possessed, unimpressed, completely natural, always sane, without attitude or pretense … the greatest of the screen’s great broads. No one was better at playing someone both fun-loving yet grounded, ready for a great time, yet substantial, too.” She was fun-loving, but sometimes there were limits. As a flip waitress in Other Men’s Women (1931), Joan puts the breaks on a fresh customer:
BLONDELL: Anything else you guys want?
CUSTOMER (checking her out as she bends over): Yeah, give me a big slice of you—and some french fried potatoes on the side.
BLONDELL: Listen, baby, I’m A.P.O.
CUSTOMER (turning to friend): What does she mean, A.P.O.?
BLONDELL: Ain’t Putting Out.
“I was the fizz on the soda,” she once said. “I just showed my big boobs and tiny waist and acted glib and flirty.” While that’s a fair assessment of most of her early roles, it wasn’t the whole story.
”
”
Ray Hagen (Killer Tomatoes: Fifteen Tough Film Dames)
“
Ballad"
Oh dream, why do you do me this way?
Again, with the digging, again with the digging up.
Once more with the shovels.
Once more, the shovels full of dirt.
The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards.
Mother beside me.
Like she’s an old hat at this.
Like all she’s got left is curiosity.
Like curiosity didn’t kill the red cat.
Such a sweet, gentle cat it was.
Here we go again, dream.
Mother, wearing her take-out-the-garbage coat.
I haven’t seen that coat in years.
The coat she wore to pick me up from school early.
She appeared at the back of the classroom, early.
Go with your mother, teacher said.
Diane, you are excused.
I was a little girl. Already a famous actress.
I looked at the other kids. I acted lucky.
Though everyone knows what an early pick-up means.
An early pick-up, dream.
What’s wrong, I asked my mother. It is early spring.
Bright sunlight. The usual birds.
Air, teetering between bearable and unbearable.
Cold, but not cold enough to shiver.
Still, dream, I shiver.
You know, my mother said.
Her long garbage coat flying.
There was a wind, that day.
A wind like a scurrying grandmother, dusting.
Look inside yourself, my mother said.
You know why I have come for you.
And still I acted lucky. Lucky to be out.
Lucky to be out in the cold world with my mother.
I’m innocent, I wanted to say.
A little white girl, trying out her innocence.
A white lamb, born into a cold field.
Frozen almost solid. Brought into the house.
Warmed all night with hair dryers.
Death? I said. Smiling. Lucky.
We’re barely to the parking lot.
Barely to the car ride home.
But the classroom already feels like the distant past.
Long ago, my classmates pitying me.
Arriving at this car full of uncles.
Were they wearing suits? Death such a formal occasion.
My sister, angry-crying next to me.
Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself.
Evilly wanting my mother to say it.
What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair.
He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute.
Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead!
Our father.
Our father, who we were not supposed to know had been dying.
He’s dead! The flute gleaming in its red case.
Here, my mother said at home.
She’d poured us each a small glass of Pepsi
We normally couldn’t afford Pepsi.
Lucky, I acted.
He’s no longer suffering, my mother said.
Here, she said. Drink this.
The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue.
My evil persisted. What is death? I asked.
And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer.
Dig, my mother says. Pry, she says.
I don’t want to see, dream.
The lid so damp it crumbles under my hands.
The casket just a drawerful of bones.
A drawerful. Just bones and teeth.
That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.
”
”
Diane Seuss
“
don’t mean girls can do just anything, or that there’s no such thing as immorality. I mean, that Balbec girl you were all talking about the other day, who’s supposed to be carrying on with that actress, well, I think that’s just disgusting—so disgusting, actually, that I can only assume it’s not true, but was invented by the girl’s enemies. It just strikes me as improbable—impossible, in fact. But letting a fellow that you like kiss you, and go even further, since you say you like me ...” “I do! But I’ve liked other fellows too. Believe you me, I’ve known other boys who were just as fond of me as you are. But there wasn’t one of them who would’ve dared do any such thing! They knew perfectly well they’d have got a good slap in the face! Anyway, the thought never entered their heads—we just shook hands in the usual way, like ordinary good friends. No one would ever have thought of kissing, but that didn’t stop us from being close friends. Look, if you really want us to be friends, then you can count yourself lucky—I must be pretty fond of you to forgive you like this. In any case, I’m sure you’re just teasing me! Andrée’s the one you really like—admit it! And I’m sure you’re right—she’s much nicer than me, and she’s beautiful! Oh, you men!” That Albertine should speak so openly was balm to my recent hurt feelings; and this gave me a high opinion of her.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
“
I was in love with her. She was very loving, very caring, very involved with me, and highly sexed. Making love with her was an entirely different thing than I had ever experienced. I had been with girls, and I had been with women, but I had never been with a woman with her level of knowledge, her level of taste. I was so incredibly taken with her, taken by her. We were both at turning points in our lives. She had been married to Robert Taylor for over ten years when he went to Italy to make Quo Vadis and had an affair, at which point Barbara [Stanwyck] threw him out. She was bitter about Taylor; she acted very quickly, almost reflexively, although I don't know that she thought it was too quick. I don't know precisely what went on between them; we never got into it. In fact, I went hunting with Bob Taylor a few times, and I think he might have known about us. At any rate, she had just gotten her divorce when we met. She was at a very vulnerable moment in her life and career. The forties are a dangerous time for any woman, and especially so for an actress whose work is her identity—definitely Barbara's way of life. The transition to playing middle-aged women has unnerved a lot of actresses—some of Barbara's contemporaries, such as Norma Shearer and Kay Francis, quit the business rather than confront it—but she faced it straight on because that's the kind of woman she was. The continuity of her career was more important to her than any individual part. Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career. Because of my youth, I suppose in one sense I was a validation of her sexuality.
”
”
Robert J. Wagner (Pieces of My Heart: A Life)
“
Speaking of debutantes,” Jake continued cautiously when Ian remained silent, “what about the one upstairs? Do you dislike her especially, or just on general principle?”
Ian walked over to the table and poured some Scotch into a glass. He took a swallow, shrugged, and said, “Miss Cameron was more inventive than some of her vapid little friends. She accosted me in a garden at a party.”
“I can see how bothersome that musta been,” Jake joked, “having someone like her, with a face that men dream about, tryin’ to seduce you, usin’ feminine wiles on you. Did they work?”
Slamming the glass down on the table, Ian said curtly, “They worked.” Coldly dismissing Elizabeth from his mind, he opened the deerskin case on the table, removed some papers he needed to review, and sat down in front of the fire.
Trying to suppress his avid curiosity, Jake waited a few minutes before asking, “Then what happened?”
Already engrossed in reading the documents in his hand, Ian said absently and without looking up, “I asked her to marry me; she sent me a note inviting me to meet her in the greenhouse; I went there; her brother barged in on us and informed me she was a countess, and that she was already betrothed.”
The topic thrust from his mind, Ian reached for the quill lying on the small table beside his chair and made a note in the margin of the contract.
“And?” Jake demanded avidly.
“And what?”
“And then what happened-after the brother barged in?”
“He took exception to my having contemplated marrying so far above myself and challenged me to a duel,” Ian replied in a preoccupied voice as he made another note on the contract.
“So what’s the girl doin’ here now?” Jake asked, scratching his head in bafflement over the doings of the Quality.
“Who the hell knows,” Ian murmured irritably. “Based on her behavior with me, my guess is she finally got caught in some sleezy affair or another, and her reputation’s beyond repair.”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
Ian expelled his breath in a long, irritated sigh and glanced at Jake with an expression that made it clear he was finished answering questions. “I assume,” he bit out, “that her family, recalling my absurd obsession with her two years ago, hoped I’d come up to scratch again and take her off their hands.”
“You think it’s got somethin’ to do with the old duke talking about you bein’ his natural grandson and wantin’ to make you his heir?” He waited expectantly, hoping for more information, but Ian ignored him, reading his documents. Left with no other choice and no prospect for further confidences, Jake picked up a candle, gathered up some blankets, and started for the barn. He paused at the door, struck by a sudden thought. “She said she didn’t send you any note about meetin’ her in the greenhouse.”
“She’s a liar and an excellent little actress,” Ian said icily, without taking his gaze from the papers. “Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get her out of here and off my hands.”
Something in Ian’s face made him ask, “Why the hurry? You afraid of fallin’ fer her wiles again?”
“Hardly.”
“Then you must be made of stone,” he teased. “That woman’s so beautiful she’d tempt any man who was alone with her for an hour-includin’ me, and you know I ain’t in the petticoat line at all.”
“Don’t let her catch you alone,” Ian replied mildly.
“I don’t think I’d mind.” Jake laughed as he left.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
What’s sacred to me? thought Fate. The vague pain I feel at the passing of my mother? An understanding of what can’t be fixed? Or the kind of pang in the stomach I feel when I look at this woman? And why do I feel a pang, if that’s what it is, when she looks at me and not when her friend looks at me? Because her friend is nowhere near as beautiful, thought Fate. Which seems to suggest that what’s sacred to me is beauty, a pretty girl with perfect features. And what if all of a sudden the most beautiful actress in Hollywood appeared in the middle of this big, repulsive restaurant, would I still feel a pang each time my eyes surreptitiously met this girl’s or would the sudden appearance of a superior beauty, a beauty enhanced by recognition, relieve the pang, diminish her beauty to ordinary levels, the beauty of a slightly odd girl out to have a good time on a weekend night with three slightly peculiar men and a woman who basically seems like a hooker? And who am I to think that Rosita Méndez seems like a hooker? thought Fate. Do I really know enough about Mexican hookers to be able to recognize them at a glance? Do I know anything about innocence or pain? Do I know anything about women? I like to watch videos, thought Fate. I also like to go to the movies. I like to sleep with women. Right now I don’t have a steady girlfriend, but I know what it’s like to have one. Do I see the sacred anywhere? All I register is practical experiences, thought Fate. An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied, people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid. And why do I think the men Rosa Amalfitano is out with are peculiar? What’s peculiar about them? And why am I so sure that if a Hollywood actress appeared all of a sudden Rosa Amalfitano’s beauty would fade? What if it didn’t? What if it sped up? And what if everything began to accelerate from the instant a Hollywood actress crossed the threshold of El Rey del Taco?
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“
We need more baskets,” Pandora said triumphantly, entering the hall.
The twins, who were clearly having a splendid time, had adorned themselves outlandishly. Cassandra was dressed in a green opera cloak with a jeweled feather ornament affixed to her hair. Pandora had tucked a light blue lace parasol beneath one arm, and a pair of lawn tennis rackets beneath the other, and was wearing a flowery diadem headdress that had slipped partially over one eye.
“From the looks of it,” Kathleen said, “you’ve done enough shopping already.”
Cassandra looked concerned. “Oh, no, we still have at least eighty departments to visit.”
Kathleen couldn’t help glancing at Devon, who was trying, without success, to stifle a grin. It was the first time she had seen him truly smile in days.
Enthusiastically the girls lugged the baskets to her and began to set objects on the counter in an unwieldy pile…perfumed soaps, powders, pomades, stockings, books, new corset laces and racks of hairpins, artificial flowers, tins of biscuits, licorice pastilles and barley sweets, a metal mesh tea infuser, hosiery tucked in little netted bags, a set of drawing pencils, and a tiny glass bottle filled with bright red liquid.
“What is this?” Kathleen asked, picking up the bottle and viewing it suspiciously.
“It’s a beautifier,” Pandora said.
“Bloom of Rose,” Cassandra chimed in.
Kathleen gasped as she realized what it was. “It’s rouge.” She had never even held a container of rouge before. Setting it on the counter, she said firmly, “No.”
“But Kathleen--”
“No to rouge,” she said, “now and for all time.”
“We need to enhance our complexions,” Pandora protested.
“It won’t do any harm,” Cassandra chimed in. “The bottle says that Bloom of Rose is ‘delicate and inoffensive’…It’s written right there, you see?”
“The comments you would receive if you wore rouge in public would assuredly not be delicate or inoffensive. People would assume you were a fallen woman. Or worse, an actress.”
Pandora turned to Devon. “Lord Trenear, what do you think?”
“This is one of those times when it’s best for a man to avoid thinking altogether,” he said hastily.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Then one night he brought home a beautiful red-haired woman and took her into our bed with me. She was a high-class call girl employed by the well-known Madame Claude. It never occurred to me to object. I took my cues from him and threw myself into the threesome with the skill and enthusiasm of the actress that I am. If this was what he wanted, this was what I would give him—in spades. As feminist poet Robin Morgan wrote in Saturday’s Child on the subject of threesomes, “If I was facing the avant-garde version of keeping up with the Joneses, by god I’d show ’em.” Sometimes there were three of us, sometimes more. Sometimes it was even I who did the soliciting. So adept was I at burying my real feelings and compartmentalizing myself that I eventually had myself convinced I enjoyed it. I’ll tell you what I did enjoy: the mornings after, when Vadim was gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed (questions I never asked myself!) and, in the case of the call girls, what had brought her to make those choices. I was shocked by the cruelty and abuse many had suffered, saw how abuse had made them feel that sex was the only commodity they had to offer. But many were smart and could have succeeded in other careers. The hours spent with those women informed my later Oscar-winning performance of the call girl Bree Daniel in Klute. Many of those women have since died from drug overdose or suicide. A few went on to marry high-level corporate leaders; some married into nobility. One, who remains a friend, recently told me that Vadim was jealous of her friendship with me, that he had said to her once, “You think Jane’s smart, but she’s not, she’s dumb.” Vadim often felt a need to denigrate my intelligence, as if it would take up his space. I would think that a man would want people to know he was married to a smart woman—unless he was insecure about his own intelligence. Or unless he didn’t really love her.
”
”
Jane Fonda (My Life So Far)
“
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women
”
”
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
“
Auto-Zoomar. Talbert knelt in the a tergo posture, his palms touching the wing-like shoulder blades of the young woman. A conceptual flight. At ten-second intervals the Polaroid projected a photograph on to the screen beside the bed. He watched the auto-zoom close in on the union of their thighs and hips. Details of the face and body of the film actress appeared on the screen, mimetized elements of the planetarium they had visited that morning. Soon the parallax would close, establishing the equivalent geometry of the sexual act with the junctions of this wall and ceiling.
‘Not in the Literal Sense.’Conscious of Catherine Austin’s nervous hips as she stood beside him, Dr Nathan studied the photograph of the young woman. ‘Karen Novotny,’ he read off the caption. ‘Dr Austin, may I assure you that the prognosis is hardly favourable for Miss Novotny. As far as Talbert is concerned the young woman is a mere modulus in his union with the film actress.’ With kindly eyes he looked up at Catherine Austin. ‘Surely it’s self-evident - Talbert’s intention is to have intercourse with Miss Taylor, though needless to say not in the literal sense of that term.’
Action Sequence. Hiding among the traffic in the near-side lane, Koester followed the white Pontiac along the highway. When they turned into the studio entrance he left his car among the pines and climbed through the perimeter fence. In the shooting stage Talbert was staring through a series of colour transparencies. Karen Novotny waited passively beside him, her hands held like limp birds. As they grappled he could feel the exploding musculature of Talbert’s shoulders. A flurry of heavy blows beat him to the floor. Vomiting through his bloodied lips, he saw Talbert run after the young woman as she darted towards the car.
The Sex Kit.‘In a sense,’ Dr Nathan explained to Koester, ‘one may regard this as a kit, which Talbert has devised, entitled “Karen Novotny” - it might even be feasible to market it commercially. It contains the following items: (1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, left nipple marked by a small ulcer, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations - the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm . . . ’ Deferring to Koester, Dr Nathan put down the typescript. ‘There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
“
Because I was so involved with Barbara [Stanwyck], I was off-limits for other women, which was something of a problem for the studio. They wanted to promote the image of a carefree young stud—never my style—so I had publicity dates with young actresses around town like Lori Nelson or Debra Paget. This was a relic of the days when the studio system was in its prime. The studio would arrange for two young stars-in-waiting to go out to dinner and a dance and assign a photographer to accompany them. The result would be placed in a fan magazine. It was a totally artificial story documenting a nonexistent relationship, but it served to keep the names of young talents in front of the public. As far as I was concerned, it was part of the job, and usually pleasant enough. When reporters would ask me about my romantic life, which they did incessantly, I had to say things like, "If I go out with one woman a few times, it's considered a romance. If I date a lot of girls, I'm a Casanova. It's one of those 'heads-you-win-tails-I-lose' deals. I don't think it's anybody's business what I do." The last sentence contained my true feelings.
”
”
Robert J. Wagner (Pieces of My Heart: A Life)
“
Alternatively he can make his peace with it, as he sees the young men around him do, one by one: settle for marriage and a house and car, settle for what life realistically has to offer, sink their energies in their work. He is chagrined to see how well the reality principle operates, how, under the prod of loneliness, the boy with spots settles for the girl with the dull hair and the heavy legs, how everyone, no matter how unlikely, finds, in the end, a partner. Is that his problem, and is it as simple as that: that all the time he has been overestimating his worth on the market, fooling himself into believing he belongs with sculptresses and actresses when he really belongs with the kindergarten teacher on the housing estate or the apprentice manageress of the shoe store? Marriage: who would have imagined he would be feeling the tug, however faint, of marriage! He is not going to give in, not yet. But it is an option he plays with on the long winter evenings, eating his bread and sausages in front of Major Arkwright's gas fire, listening to the radio, while the rain patters in the background against the window.
”
”
J.M. Coetzee
“
Why the most people and especially the girls prefer film actors and actresses photos to display their affection, is it the weakness or phobia, why do they not choose academic and prominent literary figures to show their soberness?
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
t was also confirmed that both actress and director were aware that Weinstein was due to visit, and that he went to see Jennifer to discuss a project with her for an hour, also presenting her with a handbag from his girlfriend's fashion label, Marchesa.
”
”
Nadia Cohen (Jennifer Lawrence: Girl on Fire)
“
It was also confirmed that both actress and director were aware that Weinstein was due to visit, and that he went to see Jennifer to discuss a project with her for an hour, also presenting her with a handbag from his girlfriend's fashion label, Marchesa.
”
”
Nadia Cohen (Jennifer Lawrence: Girl on Fire)
“
Decades later, we do not watch her as a movie star playing at or around a role, nor are we conscious of her gestures, her slight raising of the eyebrows, the sudden drop of her voice. We do not observe an “artiste” struggling to impress. Grace Kelly, the beautiful actress, disappears when we watch Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl; we see only the real weariness of a woman almost out of strength, almost empty of feeling—except that her feeling, and ours, is indeed too deep for tears.
”
”
Donald Spoto (High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly)
“
The characters so many Bollywood actresses portray are ultimately flat, uncomplicated, two-dimensional stock characters that typically range between the girl-next-door and the diva. They may be flawed in small ways, but ultimately lack nuance, conform to and reinforce cultural expectations of a wholesome but ultimately submissive Indian women. The likability of these flat and boring characters hold the actresses' off screen reputations in good stead but reinforce the very norms that imprison and render so many Indian women vulnerable to disrespect and sexism.
”
”
Sharanya Haridas
“
The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
Ruthledge himself was the guiding light, the good Samaritan. He had a daughter, Mary, who grew up without a mother. Helping him raise the child was a kindly housekeeper, Ellen. Then there was Ned Holden, abandoned by his mother, who just turned up one night; being about Mary’s age, he forged a friendship with the little girl that inevitably, as they grew up, turned to love. They were to marry, but just before the wedding Ned learned that his mother was convicted murderess Fredrika Lang. What was worse, Ruthledge had known this and had not told him. Feeling betrayed, Ned disappeared. He would finally return, crushing Mary with the news that he now had a wife, the vibrant actress Torchy Reynolds. Also prominent in the early shows was the Kransky family. Abe Kransky was an orthodox Jew who owned a pawnshop. Much of the action centered on his daughter Rose and her struggle to rise above the squalor of Five Points. Rose had a scandalous affair with publishing magnate Charles Cunningham (whose company would bring out Ned Holden’s first book when Ned took a fling at authorship), only to discover that Cunningham was merely cheating on his wife, Celeste. In her grief, Rose turned to Ellis Smith, the eccentric young artist who had come to Five Points as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” Smith (also not his real name) took Rose in to “give her a name.” The Kransky link with the Ruthledges came about in the friendship of the girls, Rose and Mary. In 1939, in one of her celebrated experiments, Phillips shifted the Kranskys into a new serial, The Right to Happiness. The Ruthledge-Kransky era began to fade in 1944, when actor Arthur Peterson went into the service. Rather than recast, Phillips sent Ruthledge away as well, to the Army as a chaplain. By the time Peterson-Ruthledge returned, two years later, the focus had moved. For a time the strong male figure was Dr. Richard Gaylord. By 1947 a character named Dr. Charles Matthews had taken over. Though still a preacher, and still holding forth at Good Samaritan, Ruthledge had moved out of center stage. The main characters were Charlotte
”
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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Hedda Hopper had had several careers before moving into radio and becoming one of the two major outlets for Hollywood gossip. She was born Elda Furry, June 2, 1890. She was a chorus girl, a silent-screen actress, and a real estate saleswoman. She had married comedian De Wolf Hopper and changed her name to Hedda, though she was occasionally confused with Edna Wallace Hopper, who gave beauty tips on the networks ca. 1930–32. In 1936 she decided to break into radio. Louella Parsons was then the country’s top purveyor of gossip, and Hopper—with her 25-year background in Hollywood—
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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A public service announcement aired right afterward, with the actress who played Jennifer - who was twenty-three at the time - warning girls what a big step sex was and how they should be well informed and prepared. I wondered why they never gave boys these kinds of warnings. Why, when a guy scored on TV, they didn't break away with a special message, with the scene's star cautioning young men that once you fuck, you'll never be the same.
”
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Maitland Ward (My Escape from Hollywood: Unapologetic, Unfiltered, and Unashamed)
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She talked to Sidelnikov, and all the material on the serf composer is here. His name was Maxim Sasontovich Beriozovsky, and he was born on 16 October 1745 in Glukhov. In 1765 he was sent to the Musical Academy of Bologna, where he studied under Padre Tartini the Elder, who was a pupil of Mozart. He became an honorary member of the Bologna Academy, as well as being a member of other musical academies. He wrote the opera Demophones, based on texts by Metastasio, for the Livorno Opera. He composed a great deal of superb music and became very well known in Italy
In 1774 he returned to Russia at the wish of Potyomkin, who proposed that he found a musical academy in Kremenschug. He fell in love with a serf actress belonging to Count Razoumovsky. When the Count heard of it he raped the girl and dispatched her to Siberia. Beriozovsky went to St. Petersburg where he started to drink heavily and in 1777 took his own life.
In Bologna there lives someone called Napoleone Fonti, aged seventy, who knows a lot about Beriozovsky and what happened to him. His scores are in Bologna and Livorno
”
”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“
Did you know she used to be an actress?'
'She must be going Method on the part of the histrionic old brandy-sodden harpy, then.
”
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Mhairi McFarlane (Who’s That Girl?)
“
When I worked at Saturday Night Live, I had a five A.M. argument with one of our most intelligent actresses. It was rumored that Lorne was adding another woman to the cast, and she was irate. (In fairness, she was also exhausted. It was five A.M. after writing all night.) She felt there wouldn’t be enough for the girls and that this girl was too similar to her. There wouldn’t be enough screen time to go around. I revived my old argument: How could this be true if we made up the show? A bunch of us suggested that they collaborate instead of compete. And, of course, that’s what they did, with great success, once they were actually in a room together. But where does that initial panic come from? This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. “You’re up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.” Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.
”
”
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
“
Lourd playing Leia in a flashback sequence in Star Wars The Force Awakens,used to be a rumor believed half heartedly by many not too long ago. Until she confirmed that portraying Leia in a flashback sequence was not the case. Why would she play Leia (in or not in a flashback sequence) in the first place? Is she identical to her mother? You decide that for yourself. I think Lourd is a good actress but not the Leia kind of girl. She seems to think that because she is Fisher's daughter, she can be hired. And there is a high chance that she will in Rogue One or some other Star Wars spin-off, But only because she is Fisher's daughter. If she wasn't the offspring of Fisher/Lourd, then she would probably not even care about getting hired to play Princess Leia unless she was asked. It is quite obvious that Lourd only wants to follow in her Mother's footsteps. She admires her Mother, (Fisher) and that is why she desires to play Princess Leia. Because she is Fisher's daughter she probably will be hired. But probably only for Rogue One or Star Wars Rebels. She only can stay young for a while. She is now 23 years old wich is about the same age as Fisher when she was filming for Star Wars Episode VII: Return of the Jedi. Lourd does not have much time left. But Disney seems to like her so she has a slight chance. Considering her father's being a casting agent, Lourd has an even greater chance of fulfilling her dream. But Disney could put more thought into her age and her looks. Does she look and sound like Fisher? I'll leave that to you." -Anne Onamuss
”
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Anonymous
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Other wartime activities included designing a radio-controlled torpedo with actress Hedy Lamarr, with whom he shared the patent. He also syndicated a column of advice to the lovelorn, “Boy Advises Girl”. Some claim Antheil inspired Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonely Hearts.
”
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Robert R. Reilly (Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music)
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Mrs. Ruchet was a big, imposing woman with short, curly, blonde hair tangled wildly around her oval face. She spent most of her days sitting on her couch, her two huge legs propped on a dark green cushion in front of her, watching soap operas on television, all the while hating the actresses for being so thin.
”
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Anna Adams (A French Girl in New York (The French Girl, #1))
“
actresses. But when he got married, he told this fancy woman he was done with her, just like a high-minded man ought to do. But she wouldn’t let him go. He was her last chance, you see. She was through at the Jewel Box. Not that them girls at the Jewel Box are supposed
”
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Gwen Bristow (Jubilee Trail)
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Jong-Il’s elite team of bodyguards was one of the most sinister, intriguing aspects of his way of life. He kept 120 of them and preferred them to be orphans; once hired they were not permitted to visit home or to ever leave the Leader’s side. If they wanted to marry, they were only allowed to marry a typist or secretary from a specific unit of the Party, and the matchmaking procedure itself was bizarre. A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife. If the bodyguard refused to marry the stranger, he would have to wait another two years before being able to reapply—and this time he would have to marry the girl whose photograph he had blindly drawn, whether he liked the look of her or not, at risk of being dismissed.
”
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Paul Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power)
“
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women around us to do the same.
”
”
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
“
Strangely enough, she never insisted they cast a Black actress as the lead.
”
”
Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)
“
teenage girls, please don't worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. what I've noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. for us overlooked kids, it's so wonderfully fair.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
Young Hans Reiter also liked to walk, like a diver, but he didn’t like to sing, for divers never sing. Sometimes he would walk east out of town, along a dirt road through the forest, and he would come to the Village of Red Men, where all they did was sell peat. If he walked farther east, there was the Village of Blue Women, in the middle of a lake that dried up in the summer. Both places looked like ghost towns, inhabited by the dead. Beyond the Village of Blue Women was the Town of the Fat. It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-upon earth, which is a thin smell, a smell like Chorda filum.
In the Town of the Fat, as was to be expected, there were many animals and several butcher shops. Sometimes, on his way home, moving like a diver, he watched the Town of the Fat citizens wander the streets of the Village of Blue Women or the Village of Red Men and he thought that maybe the villagers, those who were ghosts now, had died at the hands of the inhabitants of the Town of the Fat, who were surely fearsome and relentless practitioners of the art of killing, no matter that they never bothered him, among other reasons because he was a diver, which is to say he didn’t belong to their world, where he came only as an explorer or a visitor.
On other occasions his steps took him west, and he walked down the main street of Egg Village, which each year was farther and farther from the rocks, as if the houses could move on their own and chose to seek a safer place near the dells and forests. It wasn’t far from Egg Village to Pig Village, a village he imagined his father never visited, where there were many pigstys and the happiest herds of pigs for miles around, pigs that seemed to greet the passerby regardless of his social standing or age or marital status, with friendly grunts, almost musical, or in fact entirely musical, while the villagers stood frozen with their hats in their hands or covering their faces, whether out of modesty or shame it wasn’t clear.
And farther on was the Town of Chattering Girls, girls who went to parties and dances in even bigger towns whose names the young Hans Reiter heard and immediately forgot, girls who smoked in the streets and talked about sailors at a big port who served on this or that ship, the names of which the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot, girls who went to the movies and saw the most thrilling films, with actors who were the handsomest men on the planet and actresses who, if one wanted to be fashionable, one had to imitate, and whose names the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot. When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him where he’d spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing that came to mind, anything but the truth.
Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“
a boob job was silly and embarrassing, a job for silly embarrassing women, porn actresses, Real Housewives, Pam Anderson. Girls like me didn’t get breast implants. We didn’t need to be affirmed, or weren’t supposed
”
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Allie Rowbottom (Aesthetica)
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Lesbians were, in the public image, loathsome creatures. They were seen as hard, sophisticated females who seduced innocent girls or women into mysterious “perversions,” or as sad caricatures of men, trying to dress and act as males, and generally aping some of men’s worst characteristics. Hollywood made “butchy” women into repellent monsters, vampires, or other subhuman creatures, and the theater portrayed practitioners of the love that dares not speak its name as neurotic, tragic, or absurd. No woman in her right mind would want to be seen so negatively. No actress admitting to loving women would be a success.
”
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Axel Madsen (The Sewing Circle: Hollywood's Greatest Secret—Female Stars Who Loved Other Women)
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Building on beauty... seems to me the worst thing any girl can do.
”
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Thelma Todd
“
the problem with stage actresses is that once they are gone, they are forgotten. If you never saw her perform onstage, then you would not be able to understand her power and appeal.
”
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Elizabeth Gilbert (City of Girls)
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Nevertheless, girls were brought up to regard their virginity as something sacrosant, prudery was the rule, hysterical breakdowns were frequent. Men, single or not, went to obtain from actresses or working girls what the women of their own milieu longed to give them but could not, for their honour stood in the way. A respectable woman, in Vienna as elsewhere, did not possess a body. If she discovered she did have one, then the devil must have got into the holy water. Once her sexuality was aroused, the irripressible violence of her instincts, her natural propensity to lewdness, would be unleashed. Women had to be defended against themselves, by education and constraint. And it was from them, insatiable women with thighs outspread, that men must be protected if they were not to lose the best of themselves. For a lustful woman diverted a man from the intellectual preoccupations of which he had the monopoly, she distracted his energies from superior accomplishments, she was the natural enemy of morality, reason, and creativity.
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Françoise Giroud (Alma Mahler, or, The Art of Being Loved)
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I love playing a board game called What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls, in which you draw cards qualifying or disqualifying you for six possible outcomes: model, actress, nurse, teacher, stewardess, and ballerina. (“You are overweight” is the worst card to draw, because it alone eliminates two-thirds of the options.)
”
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Kristi Coulter (Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career)
“
She is an actress. She is playing herself. She is ready for her screen test.
”
”
Kate Zambreno (Green Girl)
“
But Chevette hadn’t wanted a career, or not the way Tara-May meant it, and Tara-May just hadn’t been able to get that. Actually there were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood, maybe even most people were; everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of yet, except she hadn’t really ever been called, but they had her number. Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked to Chevette like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that, or talk to you much if you didn’t buy into what they “really” did.
”
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William Gibson (All Tomorrow's Parties (Bridge, #3))
“
Well, I know what I want to be too,” she told her parents. “An actress on Broadway.”
“Caroline, you’re always onstage, twenty-four hours a day,” said her father. “You can’t even tie your shoes without making a production of it.”
Caroline wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not.
”
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (The Girls' Revenge (Boy/Girl Battle, #4))
“
...if you are a beautiful girl in LA, countless men come up and say, "Are you an actress?" just to see if they can sleep with you.
”
”
Rose McGowan (Brave)
“
Eat- Yō Sandwich
(Lunch)
It is a foot long;
Ha- better than six inches, said Maddie. Karly- Suck on your meatballs…
‘You should know you’ve done both.’ Some girl down the table- said.
Let’s talk about books, said Olivia.
God just shot me in the head, so I can die, ha- hey see the sped?
Nice- book’s- Maddie- ha!
Karly- I think movies like Twilight freaking suck, (Throwing both middle fingers in the air making a skilling face.) The sporting actress made fame, what it is. Look at her and the look at that, what is- that, I love Anna Kendrick?
Teach walking by saying that a mother-week Barns.
Liv- I think she would have made a better Bella, than the girl with no personality, yet that’s the book I read that thing and it was painful.
I guess that my assignment in life is over my Karly kiss my ass where it is brown and holy!
And that another one, sure it is… Suck my clit.
No!
Yes, you want to! (Sexy eyes)
That's it- you're expelled-
Good now I can party and have some fun sleeping and not doing this crap, so you're going to punish me by not being here, freak yeah!
The towing sickness of a teacher whose name is Mr. Abdèlaziz Okay smart-ie, in-school suspension, then right.
Karly- Freaking-, ho-bag, psycho, b*tch, p*ssy-tart- cunt! Under her breath.
(She gets taken out by her hair, by the officer what’s his name, roughly, I might add.)
Like who paints a room all black, and faces the desks at the wall, where you could only piss two times… no air to speak of and some fat ass smelling like crap farting up and down the five by thirdly long skinny room, next to you is what… I got six out of seven freaking hours, all week I might add.
~*~
(Flashback)
I love bands that are not cool so what do you do here?
Freak yeah, at least I made it as one of our dumb ho’s… in a short skirt that shows nothing under it, to think I made it, wow good to think… you think I am good enough to be the same look, and size or whatever, yet you can’t say the N-word or a knotty little swore ward… Yet- yet- teachers can call me every name you can think of… in the urban book of crap, like I cannot even wear a tank… without a bra in the halls, yet, this girl can… do you see all the bouncing, and nipples pointing, at you, I sure do?
”
”
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh A Void She Cannot Feel)
“
Moon River’ was written to explain that Audrey/Holly was really a yearning country girl; it becomes an anachronism, therefore, to have it sung by a male singer, although Danny Williams’s version later became a top-of-the-hit-parade best-seller. It was Audrey’s rendition of the song, in fact, which first convinced many critics that they were dealing with no ordinary talent. The cigarette-girl extra in the British quickie had reached the Olympian heights and become a Hollywood superstar; most agreed that it would have been hard to think of any other actress who could have suggested as convincingly as Audrey did the desperate frailty beneath Holly’s smart façade.
”
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Ian Woodward (Audrey Hepburn: Fair Lady of the Screen)
“
She's really not much of an actress, but she enchants people just the same. I've seen strangers stop what they're doing to watch her shake sugar into her tea.
”
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Kimberly King Parsons (Black Light)
“
Remember when another heir called a certain red-haired actress a fire-crotch on camera? No? Well, I remember. Redheads across America sucked in a collective gasp, because we knew. The jokes boys made to us about Raggedy Ann, the Wendy’s girl, and Pippi Longstocking would finally stop, as we’d always hoped, only to be replaced by something infinitely worse.
”
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Jennifer Echols (The Ex Games)
“
I think we should all just lie down beside each other with our arms folded over our chests and die peacefully," Caroline said in a hoarse whisper, ever the actress.
”
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (The Girls Get Even (Boy/Girl Battle, #2))
“
What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were housed in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we’re all built a little bit that way. But most of us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful.
When I think now of that moment in the kitchen, an almost unbelievable thought comes to my mind: There was a time when those two people - that man hunched at the table and that woman shouting in a bathrobe - were young. The proof was in the pictures that hung on the living room walls, a pretty girl and a bookish guy, a studio apartment in a crumbling Hollywood building overlooking a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday/. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointment, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined - and they never imagined this.
”
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Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
“
I can't believe this is really happening," Caroline said to Wally, both of them wearing their goblin cloaks and hoods. "I'm a real actress at last. Do you know where you'll see my name someday?"
"On a tombstone?" said Wally.
Caroline flashed him a disgusted look. "In lights! On Broadway! Someday you and your brothers will go to the movies and see me up there on the screen."
"If we see you on the screen, we'll ask for our money back," Wally told her.
”
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (The Girls Get Even (Boy/Girl Battle, #2))
“
Lauren and Alexis each had their own, and Ed and I shared one, which was great fun. He was smart and funny and a real professional, and we quickly discovered that we had a lot in common. We were both happily married, with homes on the East Coast. Not only did we both come from New York theater backgrounds, but I’d forgotten that we actually won Tony Awards on that same magical night in 1976—mine for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical in A Chorus Line, and his for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play called Mrs. Warren’s Profession. We were even mutually addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzles, which we did together every day we worked.
”
”
Kelly Bishop (The Third Gilmore Girl)